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Details

NOTE: This distro comes on a 16GB USB Flash Drive. Please ensure that your system has USB 2.0 + ports before ordering. Kali Linux will come on a name brand USB flash drive. We use Kingston, Adata, PNY, or SanDisk USBs.

Welcome to the first release of 2018, Kali Linux 2018.1. This fine release contains all updated packages and bug fixes since our 2017.3 release last November. This release wasn’t without its challenges–from the Meltdown and Spectre excitement (patches will be in the 4.15 kernel) to a couple of other nasty bugs, we had our work cut out for us but we prevailed in time to deliver this latest and greatest version for your installation pleasure.

Kernel Updated to 4.14

Kali Linux 2018.1 has a shiny new 4.14.12 kernel. New kernels always have a lot of new features and the 4.14 kernel is no exception, although two new features really stand out.

AMD Secure Memory Encryption Support – Secure Memory Encryption is a feature that will be in newer AMD processors that enables automatic encryption and decryption of DRAM. The addition of this features means that systems will no longer (in theory) be vulnerable to cold-boot attacks because, even with physical access, the memory will be not be readable.

Increased Memory Limits – Current (and older) 64-bit processors have a limit of 64 TB of physical address space and 256 TB of virtual address space (VAS), which was sufficient for more than a decade but with some server hardware shipping with 64 TB of memory, the limits have been reached. Fortunately, upcoming processors will enable 5-level paging, support for which is included in the 4.14 kernel. In short, this means that these new processors will support 4 PB of physical memory and 128 PB of virtual memory. That’s right, petabytes.

Package Updates

In addition to the updated kernel, we have also upgraded a number of packages, including zaproxy, secure-socket-funneling, pixiewps, seclists, burpsuite, dbeaver, and reaver.

Hyper-V Updates

For those of you using Hyper-V to run the Kali virtual machines provided by Offensive Security, you will find that the Hyper-V virtual machine is now generation 2, which means it’s now UEFI-based and expanding/shrinking HDD is supported. The Hyper-V integration services are also included, which supports Dynamic Memory, Network Monitoring/Scaling, and Replication.

About Kali Linux

Kali Linux is a Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at advanced Penetration Testing and Security Auditing. Kali contains several hundred tools aimed at various information security tasks, such as Penetration Testing, Forensics and Reverse Engineering. Kali Linux is developed, funded and maintained by Offensive Security, a leading information security training company.

Kali Linux was released on the 13th March, 2013 as a complete, top-to-bottom rebuild of BackTrack Linux, adhering completely to Debian development standards.

More than 600 penetration testing tools included: After reviewing every tool that was included in BackTrack, we eliminated a great number of tools that either simply did not work or which duplicated other tools that provided the same or similar functionality. Details on what’s included are on the Kali Tools site.

Free (as in beer) and always will be: Kali Linux, like BackTrack, is completely free of charge do download and always will be. You will never, ever have to pay for Kali Linux.

Open source Git tree: We are committed to the open source development model and our development tree is available for all to see. All of the source code which goes into Kali Linux is available for anyone who wants to tweak or rebuild packages to suit their specific needs.

Wide-ranging wireless device support: A regular sticking point with Linux distributions has been supported for wireless interfaces. We have built Kali Linux to support as many wireless devices as we possibly can, allowing it to run properly on a wide variety of hardware and making it compatible with numerous USB and other wireless devices.

Custom kernel, patched for injection: As penetration testers, the development team often needs to do wireless assessments, so our kernel has the latest injection patches included.

Developed in a secure environment: The Kali Linux team is made up of a small group of individuals who are the only ones trusted to commit packages and interact with the repositories, all of which is done using multiple secure protocols.

GPG signed packages and repositories: Every package in Kali Linux is signed by each individual developer who built and committed it, and the repositories subsequently sign the packages as well.

Multi-language support: Although penetration tools tend to be written in English, we have ensured that Kali includes true multilingual support, allowing more users to operate in their native language and locate the tools they need for the job.

Completely customizable: We thoroughly understand that not everyone will agree with our design decisions, so we have made it as easy as possible for our more adventurous users to customize Kali Linux to their liking, all the way down to the kernel.

ARMEL and ARMHF support: Since ARM-based single-board systems like the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black, among others, are becoming more and more prevalent and inexpensive, we knew that Kali’s ARM support would need to be as robust as we could manage, with fully working installations for both ARMEL and ARMHF systems. Kali Linux is available on a wide range of ARM devices and has ARM repositories integrated with the mainline distribution so tools for ARM are updated in conjunction with the rest of the distribution.

Kali Linux is specifically tailored to the needs of penetration testing professionals, and therefore all documentation on this site assumes prior knowledge of, and familiarity with, the Linux operating system in general. Please see Should I Use Kali Linux? for more details on what make Kali unique.